Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Literary Agents

What are the hardest decisions
you have to make as an agent?
STEINBERG: A lot of times it's
books that you know you could sell for a lot of money but you still say no.

STEIN: Or you take the preempt
because you know it's the right house, or you take the lower offer because you
know it's the right house. And you hope that you're right.

MASSIE: Another hard one is telling
an author that his newest book is not there, or not the one, or you're not
happy with it, or you just don't see it or know what to do with it. That's a
really hard conversation to have, especially with someone you've worked with
for a long time. For me, at least, that's the hardest conversation I ever have.

STEIN: Firing a client.

STEINBERG: Or not being able to
sell her work. That's one of the hardest things about the business. You take
things on because you inherently love them. That's why you do it. You think
you'll sell them, and you think everyone will be happy, and then you come to
that end of the road where you've done your second round of submissions and
wracked your brain for the last three unlikely suspects and they all pass.
That's a very difficult conversation.

STEIN: And that's the novel that
haunts you for years. That's the novel you think is, in some ways, the best
novel you've ever taken on.

But that's not a decision you
have to make.
RUTMAN: We're just eager to get to
the "What are the worst features of the job?" question. Can we skip right to
that? [Laughter.] Seriously, though,
deciding what to take on is probably the hardest decision. I find myself
sitting on fences a lot more often than I would like. Sometimes I feel like I
just run out of critical faculties. My discernment just isn't guiding me very
authoritatively and I can't decide whether I ought to be working with a book or
not. Because you see its virtues, or your hesitations kind of nullify each
other enough to make it hard to decide.

When you guys find yourselves in
that situation, how do you decide?
STEIN: If it's something brand
new—if the author is not a client—sometimes it's about the writer. If I have
an editorial conversation with the writer, and I'm sort of feeling out the
situation, that will sometimes do it for me. Because if they're with me, and I
feel like we'll have a good editorial relationship—we need to have a good
editorial relationship, probably for a long time, before we send out the
book—that will become clear. If we have those initial conversations, and I
feel like we won't work well together, for any number of reasons, then the
decision becomes much easier.

MASSIE: If I'm on the fence for too
long it's not a good sign. My feeling is that usually, when I love something,
I'm jumping all over it. So if I'm on the fence it's probably not good for the
writer and it's not good for me. If I can't imagine myself getting on the phone
and calling ten editors and saying, "I love this. You should read this right
now," then it's probably not right for me. It also wouldn't be fair to the
author for me to take it on.

RUTMAN: You're right. It's not fair
to the author. But I also have the misfortune of having my enthusiasms located
on some difficult-to-access frequency. Sometimes I'm just not sure what I think,
and I'll react differently to a book on different days. I've certainly had the
experience where I return to a manuscript and think, "I was wavering about
this? This is obviously exceptional and I should take it on." And, less
happily, the reverse. It's nice to have access, or confident access, to your
feelings.

STEINBERG: It's also nice to know
when you're not ready to make a decision. "I'll wait till tomorrow because I'm
in a bad mood or tired or whatever it is." And I also use the phone call as a
sort of determining factor. But, like Maria, I'm not really on the fence that
often. I think that's a good thing.

MASSIE: I just know from experience
that if I take something on that I've been on the fence about, it won't
necessarily take priority. If I take on something with guns blazing, and I
totally love it, that's at the top of my list all the time. If I've been on the
fence about something and I decide to take it on thinking, "Okay, I'm on the
good side of the fence now," I've been there and I can sense that it won't take
priority and I'm not going to give it as much as I should. It's just not fair
to the author. It's not fair to me, either, because I have only so many hours
in the day.

STEINBERG: I think editors can
sense it too.

MASSIE: Editors totally know. They absolutely know.

STEINBERG: Just as we're good at
sensing things, they're good at knowing when the agent isn't enthusiastic
enough.

STEIN: And you will see all the
doubts you had about the book in the rejection letters. You can often gauge
your true reaction to a book by the rejections. If it's something where you're
really guns blazing—if you really love
it—when you see the rejection letters you think, "You. Are. Out. Of. Your.
Mind. You're out of your mind!" And that's how you should feel all the time.

MASSIE: Exactly. You see the
rejections and you think, "No. I don't agree at all. You don't know what you're
talking about!"

RUTMAN: When you strenuously
disagree with a rejection, that's a really reliable gauge. Because a fair
number of times I think, "Oh, well, yeah. I half anticipated that and I suppose
I can see your point." When you sharply disagree, you were right to take it on.

STEINBERG: I think it's also the
art of the agent to anticipate the rejections from the editors and try to fix
the material before you get the rejections. One thing that I'm cursed with is
that when I read the material I sort of see the rejections go across my eyes. I
can see how people will reject it, and you work on the material in light of
that. Invariably, whenever I don't listen to my own instincts and fix that
thing that was nagging at the back of my mind, I will get a rejection that says
the very thing that I should have fixed. It's like, "Damn. Listen to your
instincts." That's a big part of the job these days, especially because editors
are looking to pass. They have a billion things on their desks and they think,
"Oh, I figured it out. This is how I'm
going to pass on this book." You can't give them that. You can't let them find
their entry point to pass.

STEIN: Which is why we'll have that
extra paragraph in our pitch letters in a year that will basically say, "This
is how you can publish this book. I've already thought it through and this is
how you can publish it."

STEINBERG: It'll be like a
marketing section for fiction, just like nonfiction proposals.

MASSIE: Exactly. That's got to be
the next thing, right?

STEINBERG: That's depressing.

Tell me a little about how you
spend your days.
STEIN: The morning is all e-mail.

MASSIE: E-mail, phone, contracts.

RUTMAN: Not reading.

MASSIE: I never read in the office.

STEIN: Manuscripts are for travel.
Trains. Planes.

MASSIE: Thank God for the Sony
Reader.

STEIN: I can't get mine to work. I
can't get it to charge.

Sony's not going to be happy to
hear that.
STEIN: Sony can send me some swag
to make it up to me. [Laughter.]

MASSIE: I don't know about you
guys, but I feel like I sit in front of my computer doing e-mail all day.

RUTMAN: How many stray issues are
floating in front of you at any given moment? How many small but unignorable
questions are hovering at any given moment?

STEIN: By the afternoon I can start
returning phone calls and dealing with shit on my desk, whereas the morning is
just an e-mail suck.

STEINBERG: It's reactive.

STEIN: Exactly. It's e-mail suck
reactive. But sometime after lunch you can start—and when I say "after lunch"
I don't necessarily mean going to lunch, because we don't necessarily go to
lunch anymore—but in the afternoon you can start to look at the contracts and
return the phone calls and whatever else. Unless you're submitting a book, in
which case it takes up the whole day.

What about after the afternoon?
STEIN: Drinks.

MASSIE: Home to the kids.

RUTMAN: Roundtables, mostly. [Laughter.]

STEIN: If I'm not going out, I work
until nine. Not that I do that often, but that's what I do. And I'm not reading
manuscripts. It's more of the same stuff.

So when do you read?
STEINBERG: If I have to read, I
don't go into the office. I've tried that before and thought, "Okay, I'll do
some work and then I'll read for a few hours." But it just doesn't work. You
get sucked into your e-mail and the other issues of the day. Sometimes in the
morning, when my brain feels fresh and I can really concentrate, I'll go
straight to Starbucks or somewhere that's not my office and read or work on
some material. I try to read late at night but I always fall asleep. My wife finds
me on the couch with the manuscript pages fallen off onto the floor.

STEIN: I won't take a manuscript
into my bedroom.

MASSIE: I don't either.

STEIN: Only books.

MASSIE: Me too. I have to read at
least ten pages of a book that I have nothing to do with.

STEIN: For me it's twenty-five. Not
that I actually make it to twenty-five, but I try to set that as my goal. I say
twenty-five so that I make it to maybe
eight.

MASSIE: I have to do that to clean
my head. I try to read for at least an hour after my kids go to bed every
night.

STEINBERG: I love to read on
airplanes. I get so excited. I'm like, "I'm going to read this whole thing!"
That's a great feeling.

STEIN: As long as there aren't
really good movies on the plane.

STEINBERG: I have a rule that I
won't buy the headphones.

STEIN: I don't have a TV at home,
so I get very excited when I'm in front of one. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: I also have a rule that
if I'm on a train or something, I'm not allowed to buy the newspaper. Because I
have to do work. But I'm allowed to look at other people's newspapers.

You mentioned before that
editors are looking for excuses to pass on projects. I'm curious what else you
see as changing about your jobs. Or what's getting harder?
STEINBERG: One thing that's
changing is that everyone is reading on Kindles or Sony Readers. I've made an
adjustment in my head and when I envision an editor reading the material,
they're sitting somewhere and reading on the Kindle or the Sony Reader. I don't
know how that affects what I submit yet, but it's certainly something I'm
thinking about.

STEIN: With nonfiction I think
about trends all the time because it follows trends in a much more obvious way
than fiction does. With fiction, none of us follows trends—we fall in love. We
also fall in love with nonfiction, but there's a measure of practicality that
goes with it, which also has to do with our own interests. I'm particularly
interested in politics but I haven't wanted to take on a political nonfiction
book in several years. And I don't envision wanting to anytime soon. Well,
aside from Cory Booker. Do you hear me, Cory Booker?

What about Jon Favreau? Wouldn't
he be the biggest get right now?
MASSIE: Everyone must want him. Or
Reggie Love.

STEIN: But if I'm interested in
something and I need to help shape it—because often nonfiction will come in as
an idea rather than a real proposal—I definitely try to think about whether
there's a market for it considering where we are now, and where we are in our
times. That's not something that's different from ten years ago or five years
ago. But I think that considering the shrinking market will become all the more
important. There just isn't room for books that are kind of interesting to some
people anymore.

MASSIE: I think about the lack of
book reviews. All of these places are getting rid of their book review
sections. I think about that in terms of "How is a book going to get out there?
How are people going to find out about it? What can I do and what should the
author be doing beyond what the publisher is doing?" When you think about how
overworked publicists are and how small publicity departments are and how many
books they're working on, it will sometimes keep you up at night, especially if
one of your clients has a book coming out. I think, "Oh, God. What should we be
doing? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the word out?" Because
there's no such thing as a review-driven book anymore.

So what should writers be doing?
What are your authors teaching you about that?
MASSIE: To think outside the box.
To think about other ways of getting the word out. It used to be that you'd
have a meeting with the publicist, or a phone call, and there would be almost a
checklist you'd go down. "We're going to send it to the newspapers and the
magazines and this, this, this, and this." That doesn't exist anymore. It's a
whole new world. There are so many other distractions out there. You really
have to think, "Well, how do people find
out about books? Where do they hear about them?"

And what are you learning about
that from experiencing it on a daily basis?
MASSIE: I think a lot of it is word
of mouth. It seems like there's a critical mass that a book has to achieve in
order to work. You have to get all the big reviews, and if you don't, how do
you get that critical mass? Is it the independent booksellers hand-selling a
book? Is it having great placement in the front of Barnes & Noble? I mean,
I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what you have to do.

STEIN: I do think, with literary
fiction, it's about getting it in the hands of the bloggers, who we don't read.
When I say that I'm joking, but I'm also not joking. I should say the bloggers
who a whole new generation of readers are reading. And the social networking.
Everyone should have a Facebook page. Part of it is personality. Some authors
are incredibly magnetic and funny, and that's not something you can tell your
author to be. You can't tell your author, "When you do your readings, make the
audience fall in love with you."

RUTMAN: "Be more charismatic." [Laughter.]

STEIN: That's something that just
happens, and that sells books. There are certain authors who are very funny at
their readings and draw crowds, who maybe at a different time wouldn't have
sold as well as they do now. But they're just the right thing for the blogging
atmosphere and just the right thing for buzz. There's something underground
about them because they give almost stand-up comedy routines when they read. I
think it's going to be different for every author in a way that it wasn't
before, and that's why we have to think about how to publish each book
individually in a way that we didn't have to before.

What else are they teaching you?
STEINBERG: I have a client named
Keith Donohue who wrote a book called The Stolen Child, and Amazon optioned it for film. I think it might
have been the only time they ever did that. So they had a vested interest in
making the book work. And they made it work.

But that sounds like an
exception to me.
STEINBERG: That's my point. We have
to do exceptions. With fiction, these days, you have to work under the
exception rule because fiction does not have a platform. Publicists are
stumped. That's why I think nonfiction has come to the fore a little more.
Publicists are sort of like, "Well, no, we don't know what to do. We're not
really sure." They used to be able to rely on reviews and now even that's gone.
One thing I ask myself, even though I said that writers shouldn't put "I think
this could be a great movie" in their query letter, is, "Could this novel
become a movie?" I used to work at the agency that represented Chuck Palahniuk,
and before the movie version of Fight Club
came out, that hardcover had sold about five thousand copies. And after the
movie came out I think the tie-in edition sold something like a hundred
thousand copies in the first few months. So that's something I think about. I'm
like, "Wow, I need to re-create that for my clients." If a book is made into a
movie, no matter how small, it helps the writer forever.

STEIN: This is kind of an abstract
thing to say, and I don't know exactly what I mean because it hasn't happened
yet, but I think the agent's relationship with publishers has to change a
little bit. I think that it has to become a little bit less adversarial and a
little bit more open and cooperative. Which means that the publisher has to do
their part so we don't have to be
adversarial. But there can be a way for everybody.... Look, we're all in a
sinking ship. So all fucking hands on deck. I think there's a little bit of editors
not wanting to tell agents what's really going on and agents feeling like they
have to sort of choose their shots with regard to when they call editors and
ask for numbers, ask what's going on with publicity, ask about the marketing
plan, all of that stuff. And we shouldn't have to do that. We're partners in
this thing, and we're all trying to do the same thing. We shouldn't have to
feel that way, and the editors shouldn't have to feel like they have to keep
secrets. I mean, if there's a secret, or if there's something to feel ashamed
about, we should figure out what to do about it.

RUTMAN: Preemptive sharing is
really great. When editors keep you overly appraised—there's no such thing,
really—and just give you information without having to be asked, it is deeply
appreciated. I find that when a book works, it's almost always in that
situation. You feel like all of the parts of the house are working in tandem
and the editor is inclined to update you because they're pleased with the way
everything is coming together. If you have to excavate the information—

STEINBERG: It feels like pulling
teeth.

RUTMAN: Or there's just nothing
planned.

STEIN: But Jim, let's say you do
have to excavate. Or the editor is in a position where they feel like maybe
something at the publishing house has fallen short. In that situation it's best
that the editor is up-front with the agent so that they, with the
author—because it's the author's job too—can all save the day as much as
possible. It's just got to be all fucking hands on deck. You can't be all hands
on deck if everybody doesn't know what's going on.

MASSIE: There's no transparency.
You ask, "What's in the budget? What's in the marketing plan?" You're
constantly asking and you think, "Why can't you just know what's in the budget for this book? Why can't you
know what's being allocated for this book?" They're like, "We'll see, we'll
see, we'll see." No.

RUTMAN: I think there's an
assumption that you will find it lacking, and will want—

MASSIE: But it's so much better to
know. It allows you to manage expectations. It allows you to think about what
else you can do. It's so frustrating to constantly.... Managing an author,
especially a first-time author, is difficult enough. Just trying to find out
what you have to work with is so frustrating.

STEIN: They aren't used to this new
wave of reasonable agents. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: It's also this
frustrating catch-22 where they don't throw money at a book until it does well.

MASSIE: Which means it's not going
to do well. That kills me.

STEINBERG: That is incredibly frustrating to agents because a book isn't going to
do well unless you're actively doing something for it. You can't just wait and
see if it does well and then try to make it do even better.

I hope you know that that's
frustrating to editors, too. We aren't the ones making those budgeting
decisions.
STEIN: That's my point. If nobody
else at the house is doing anything for a book, the editor and the agent and
the author, every now and then, can have a flash of brilliance and come up with
something that might work.

STEINBERG: It's hard. Sometimes you
get to that conversation and you're like, "Let's think of those out-of-the-box
things that no one usually does, and let's do them," and there's sort of
silence on the phone.

Reader Comments

One more thing I would like to add, I belong to Rice Creek Writers. It's a group where mom and dad stay home and other writers critique one anothers work. Sometimes it gets pretty harsh, but that's what is needed.

robert5515@msn.com says...

What I found very helpful is what you said about the cover letter and synopsis and also the advice about when I think I'm ready to take another year and rewrite it. I did that! Twice! Maybe more. I have been working on the query letter and synopsis. I believe the query is good. I also the think the synopsis is good. But I know After the Fact, the novel, is great. And after reading the Q&A, I realize The query and synopsis doesn't have to be great. Althought, I would like it that way. Thank you, all of you.